18/5/24 - Belfairs park 'North Pitch'.
This was a win for us by 5 wickets. Again a slightly different team. The core members seem to be Nishant Khare who is now the official captain, Me, Lee Thompson, Akash Kale and Jake Wright.
The line-up today...
As it was a Friendly the coin wasn't tossed, we wanted to bowl, they wanted to bat, so that's what happened. We didn't get off to a great start, the new captain Nishant said from the outset he was going to get the youngsters into the game early. One of the kids bowled really well and got his reward with a great wicket hitting the top of the stumps taking one of the openers out of the equation. They'd been going at 6+ an over and were racing away. The two kids bowled 4 each and then Lee "Five-fer" Thompson came on bowling his SLA. He struggled initially, but then settled. I came on at the 'Seaside' end bowling 90% flippers with the odd Leg-Break. I took 2 in no-time - possibly in the 1st over? They were youngsters not even having a look - just coming after me as though I was some kind of comedy act. One was caught at Point by Archie Monk, the next was clean bowled with the kid trying to smash me into the River Thames (Its about a mile away) and the last was an adult player "Charls D'Cruz" who hit the 4's; One through cover which was a good shot and the two through deep mid-wicket which were down to me bowling leg-side full tosses - attempting to bowl big turning leg-breaks. Knowing I had to keep away from the leg-side I opted to hang some wide of the off-side as he was flashing at them with little success and the wicket keeper Eoin Mercer is pretty decent and likely to take one if he edged it. I didn't even consider Lee Thompson fielding in slips (5) as being in the game! But then D'Cruz went after one - driving wide of the stumps and Lee did a Dwayne Leverock style dive in the world cup 2007 playing against India and snaffled it. It was a superb catch and probably one of my most memorable - I can only ever recall getting a wicket in slips previously about 10 years ago!
One of the younger kids who'd struggled at the start came on again after the 'Thompson' show (Lee took 1 wicket) and took 3. One of which was as a result of catch by me. I'd been fielding at backward square inside the ring, but having seen the batter intentionally targeting the gap between me and fine leg (Between 6 and 11 below) I moved to a position closer to 11 and outside the ring and within a few balls took the catch.
The image above is the analysis of where I get hit in the games, this currently is an accumulative version showing what I recall of the three games so far. The catches have been taken at 5, 6 and 10, I've never had so many catches taken off my bowling!
Update, after a lot of faffing Nishant got something together that is an approximation rather than the exact record, but I'll go for it. The details relating to my catch are wrong, I took a wicket off Taylor Millar. My figure 6-1-18-3 which I concur with.
Other than that, at the end of the games, I'll have to get their scorer to stay behind and read out the details so I can add them to our book.
Here's our batting. The high-point here is Jake Wright. He also bowled today and got at least one wicket (Details to come apparently). But... look at his batting. This is his 2nd game and he batted recklessly in the first for about 8 runs and was disappointed with himself. It looks like he's learned and he batted really well today scoring 28 not out off of 34 balls and enjoyed it. I reckon with more games he'll get so much better. The only thing is he's just secured a job where he's expected to work Saturdays.
No comments:
Post a Comment